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PREFACE
It will become
clear, and may as well be stated at the outset, that this book is
written by a political opponent of Henry Kissinger. Nonetheless, I
have found myself continually amazed at how much hostile and
discreditable material I have felt compelled to omit. I am
concerned only with those Kissingerian offenses that might or should
form the basis of a legal prosecution: for war crimes, for crimes
against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or
international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap and
torture.
Thus, in my
capacity as a political opponent I might have mentioned Kissinger's
recruitment and betrayal of the Iraqi Kurds, who were falsely encouraged
by him to take up arms against Saddam Hussein in 1974-75, and who were
then abandoned to extermination on their hillsides when Saddam Hussein
made a diplomatic deal with the Shah of Iran, and who were deliberately
lied to as well as abandoned. The conclusions of the report by
Congressman Otis Pike still make shocking reading, and reveal on
Kissinger's part a callous indifference to human life and human rights.
But they fall into the category of depraved realpolitik, and do not seem
to have violated any known law.
In the same way,
Kissinger's orchestration of political and military and diplomatic cover
for apartheid in South Africa and the South African destabilization of
Angola, with its appalling consequences, presents us with
a morally repulsive record. Again, though, one is looking at a sordid
period
of Cold War and imperial history, and an exercise of irresponsible
power,
rather than an episode of organized crime. Additionally, one must take
into
account the institutional nature of this policy, which might in outline
have
been followed under any administration, national security advisor, or
sec-
retary of state.
Similar
reservations can be held about Kissinger's chairmanship of the
Presidential Commission on Central America in the early 1980s, which was
staffed by Oliver North and which whitewashed death squad activity in
the
isthmus. Or about the political protection provided by Kissinger, while
in
office, for the Pahlavi dynasty in Iran and its machinery of torture and
repres-
sion. The list, it is sobering to say, could be protracted very much
further. But
it will not do to blame the whole exorbitant cruelty and cynicism of
decades
on one man. ( Occasionally one gets an intriguing glimpse, as when
Kissinger
urges President Ford not to receive the inconvenient Alexander
Solzhenitsyn,
while all the time he poses as Communism's most daring and principled
foe.)
No, I have
confined myself to the identifiable crimes that can and
should be placed on a proper bill of indictment, whether the actions
taken
were in line with general "policy" or not. These include:
1. The deliberate
mass killing of civilian populations in Indochina.
2. .Deliberate collusion in mass murder, and later in assassination, in
Bangladesh.
3. The personal suborning and planning of murder, of a senior consti-
tutional officer in a democratic nation -Chile -with which the United
States was not at war.
4. Personal involvement in a plan to murder the head of state in the
democratic nation of Cyprus.
5. The incitement and enabling of genocide in East Timor.
6. Personal involvement in a plan to kidnap and murder a journalist
living in Washington, DC.
The above
allegations are not exhaustive. And some of them can only be
constructed prima facie, since Mr Kissinger -- in what may also amount to
a deliberate and premeditated obstruction of justice -has caused large
tranches of evidence to be withheld or destroyed.
However, we now
enter upon the age when the defense of "sovereign
immunity" for state crimes has been held to be void. As I demonstrate
below, Kissinger has understood this decisive change even if many of his
critics have not. The Pinochet verdict in London, the splendid activism
of
the Spanish magistracy, and the verdicts of the International Tribunal
at
The Hague have destroyed the shield that immunized crimes committed
under. the justification of raison d'etat. There is now no reason why a
war-
rant for the trial of Kissinger may not be issued, in anyone of a number
of
jurisdictions, and why he may not be compelled to answer it. Indeed, and
as I write, there are a number of jurisdictions where the law is at long
last
beginning to catch up with the evidence. And we have before us in any
case
the Nuremberg precedent, by which the United States solemnly under-
took to be bound.
A failure to
proceed will constitute a double or triple offense to justice.
First, it will violate the essential and now uncontested principle that
not
even the most powerful are above the law. Second, it will suggest that
pros-
ecutions for war crimes and crimes against humanity are reserved for
losers, or for minor despots in relatively negligible countries. This in
turn
will lead to the paltry politicization of what could have been a noble
process, and to the justifiable suspicion of double standards.
Many if not most
of Kissinger's partners in crime are now in jail, or are
awaiting trial, or have been otherwise punished or discredited. His own
lonely impunity is rank; it smells to heaven. If it is allowed to
persist then
we shall shamefully vindicate the ancient philosopher Anacharsis, who
maintained that laws were like cobwebs: strong enough to detain only the
weak, and too weak to hold the strong. In the name of innumerable
victims
known and unknown, it is time for justice to take a hand.
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